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Nationally an estimated 1 Million (20 percent) pregnancies are known to end in miscarriage. As many pregnancies are never known, it is quite probable that the true number is nearly twice that number. Most miscarriages occur within the first 12 weeks of pregnancy.
While some parents see a miscarriage to be “just one of those things”, many can be devastated by the experience even if their partners are not.
Recognizing this silent grief and the need for public awareness of it President Ronald Reagan declared October to be “Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Month.”
While awareness has grown, it has come slowly and there is a large percentage of the population that still doesn’t understand what these parents are going through.
With today’s tests, women are finding out earlier and earlier about their pregnancies and dreams are well on their way by the time a loss like this is experienced.
Compounding this pain is the fact that in many states there are no legal protections for parents who wish to bury the remains of their unborn when such an event occurs especially if the pregnancy has not advanced beyond 20 weeks.
In our case we were told very plainly that the remains would be disposed of as medical waste (Like a kidney stone or dirty syringe). Not complying with this, we were told, would result in not getting treatment at that hospital.
Grief stricken and unable to fight this system, we went along with it, the procedure was done and we went home to grieve.
Later recognizing what had been done to us we decided to get this law changed in Nebraska.
With the aid of State Senator Chip Maxwell, our law was made a priority bill and passed without opposition the following legislative session.
Now in Nebraska a woman has the right to the remains of any product of conception regardless of the duration of pregnancy. She must be informed of her rights at the time of treatment and has several days for a “remorse period” where the remains will be kept if she decides she DOES want to bury them after initially declining this right.
Despite initially seeing the hospital system in our state as an adversary, they also joined in to suggest more help in the law than we originally were asking.
We want to see this kind of common sense/compassionate legislation in all 50 states.
To our knowledge only 9 States have such legislation on the books.
Although it has been presented that some other states (Iowa, Indiana, Kansas, Rhode Island and Virginia) may have similar laws, we cannot confirm this and our searches have turned up nothing.
All other states are presumed to have no protections under the law at this time.
